Would You Kindly
by Ami.Bel
Summary: Jack has questions about his identity and decides to pay Frank a visit. Fontaine is unable to shut up and unwilling to have a civil conversation. Jack decides to get creative to get him to stay on subject. (Rated M: Violence, humiliation, and profanity.)


Rapture was disturbingly quiet in the wake of Andrew Ryan's death. There were still the Big Daddies groaning as they walked the halls. There were still the creepy bug-eyed Little Sisters flouncing about as they collected ADAM. And as Fontaine looked out the windows of his lair in Point Prometheus, he could clearly see the splicers still fighting over scraps of the city like runt hyenas on the carcass of a long dead animal.

What had gone quiet and was the source of his disturbance was his short wave radio. After finding out the truth of who he was, or rather who he wasn't, Jack had gone completely silent. Odd thing to say about someone who was already mute, but now he wouldn't even turn on his god damned radio. Tenebaum had saved the kid and so Jack had thrown his lot in with them. But from what he saw of the video feed from the camera-mounted security bots before Jack blew them the hell up, it looked like he wasn't chummy with the doctor either.

Jack spent much of his time wandering Rapture, as much as it could be considered wandering despite the dangers. He occasionally took the Little Sisters to Arcadia, along with a couple of hypnotized Big Daddies for extra protection. He ran errands for Tenebaum when she asked, often back and forth to the Medical Pavillion to get this tool or that drug. He scavenged apartments and stores and the marketplace for food and water, anything that hadn't gone bad or just didn't smell.

But mostly he spent his time alone in Suchong's clinic in Apollo Square. Somehow he had found the room he had seen before in the faded picture on Ryan's wall. The room from a faded memory that even now, he had trouble believing was real. Hidden inside the clinic was the laboratory where he was born. This room, sequestered away from everything and labeled 'cognitive conversion', was where he was raised. Jack spent hours in there. Or perhaps he had spent days. Perhaps even more than that for there was no handle on time in Rapture. There was no handle on reality either. But he had had this room. And he couldn't even remember it.

He paced its length at a deathly slow pace. He slept curled into a ball, as small as he could make himself, in the child's hospital bed that he had clearly outgrown. He sat at the desk beside it, where Suchong must have sat to watch him sleep. He read the books on the shelf next to it. He rifled through the desk and read the long gone doctor's notes and observations. He touched the medical tools laid about, the machine that hung from the ceiling and had delivered electric shocks to his brain. He grasped in his hands the moth eaten blankets that had been his bedding and stared transfixed at the clothing that had been left behind. That he himself had left behind, a tiny pair of shoes, a set of scrubs, and a straight jacket.

His parents in Nebraska were a lie. That he was being sent to visit his cousins in England was also a lie. Everything that had been in his life until now, even his name, Jack Wynand, was a lie. He was Jack Ryan, bastard son of Andrew Ryan and a show girl he had left drowning in her own blood. Jack had stepped over his own mother's body, looted it, and he hadn't even known. He played her audio diary again. He thought she sounded like she might've been a nice woman.

But there were people who did know who he was. People who had known from the beginning, possibly from the moment he even stepped into the lighthouse. There was Tenebaum... Mama Tenebaum, he had been taught to call her, he remembered that much, but he couldn't completely trust her. It was true that she had saved his life but was it only in exchange for his saving the Little Sisters? He realized he was one of them too. He was also one of Tenebaum's experiments, one of her mistakes, and a part of her guilt and regrets. What had been done to the kidnapped little girls had also been done to him. They were his family in suffering. The questions he had, that swirled in his mind, if he asked her, would she answer them? Or would she be hurt by his accusations and reproach him? The only other person who had spent more time with him, 'Papa' Suchong, was long dead now.

Barring his creators, that left him with... Fontaine. The man who bought him. The man who 'commissioned' him. Much in the way one commissions an artist to make art, or more accurately, a doll maker for a doll. He had called him... a phonograph? A jukebox? His exact words he couldn't remember but it all meant the same. He was just a puppet and Fontaine pulled the strings. He was a bomb and Fontaine held the detonator. Or so he used to...

Fontaine had tried to goad Jack into moving before. At first, he tried egging him on over the radio.

"Come on, Jackie. Quit being a sorry sob. It ain't all that bad, is it? So what you killed your old man and found out your mother's a whore? Shit, that's just life kid! Are you really going to waste time moping about it? Snap out of it, Frankenstein!"

When that didn't work, he tried sending Splicers to flush him out; first just a few scouts and then hordes. There was no telling if this revelation had set him off or if Jack had always been slightly unhinged to begin with. But either way, he was off track all the same. He didn't respond to Fontaine's taunts and jeers. He cut down Splicers with whatever he had in his hand or coursing through his veins without reacting at all. It was an honest comparison to say the Big Daddies had more of an emotional response than him. In the wake of Andrew Ryan's death, Fontaine may have gotten the power he always wanted but he was by far the only force to reckoned with. Rapture had gained a new boogeyman.

Unlike Fontaine, Jack was patient. It was his best and worst trait. It had been bred into him by Tenebaum and reinforced by Suchong's conditioning, no doubt. After all, what else would a pawn do besides wait to take orders? But he was his own master now. Even if his free will was nothing more than a part of Rapture's illusions, he could still make his own decisions. And he decided to find Fontaine. That would take patience. He had to wait until a security bot came to him. After shooting it down, he had to carefully hack its system. In all his waiting, he had found a bathosphere and another radio and taken it apart piece by piece to compare it to his own. Tenebaum, who had a great mind for biology but not so much for mechanical engineering, considered it an odd hobby but left him alone as he sat at the small work table in her safe house. The Little Sisters found his tinkering amusing and asked him a thousand questions. He wasn't bothered by their curiosity and the chatter helped him concentrate. The noise of human voices and mundane conversation helped him... feel almost normal.

His patience was indeed his greatest asset for all it took to get the security bot up to performing one task. Then he set it free and followed it. He already knew, everyone knew, Fontaine hid out in Point Prometheus. The question was finding a way in. The Little Sisters could get in and out practically unbothered but he didn't want to involve them until he was sure he had to. First he needed to know what to expect. He stuck to the walls, picked off Splicers from a distance, and stayed hidden as he followed the bot and committed the place to memory.

On his second visit, he finally brought along a Little Sister as he explored the memorial museum. As cruel as he knew it was, he couldn't free her from her zombified state just yet. He couldn't protect her if he did. He needed her to be invulnerable while he stayed hidden. Just like he needed her hypnotized protector to be complacent to his unseen presence. He led the girl through by taking out a Splicer every few feet in front of her, luring her with a new dead body to harvest from.

The only trouble he encountered was a rouge Big Daddy who resisted his hypnosis. He watched it battle the other, only assisting by taking out the attracted Splicers. When it looked like he was on the losing side, he gritted his teeth. The Little Sister had retreated to a vent and wouldn't move until the threat was taken care of. She wouldn't come out at all if her Big Daddy died. Jack gritted his teeth, his first feeling was no more than a flash of annoyance, as he picked up a fallen Splicer's mask as a halfhearted attempt at a disguise. He cursed at himself at every round of flaming buckshot he fired. It was loud and wouldn't go undetected. So much for sneaking in. Finally he just froze the damn thing in place and beat it to pieces with his wrench. With no more interruptions, they finally made it to the end of the gauntlet. He released the Little Sister and sent her on her way to Tenebaum. As for the Big Daddy, he didn't wait for the plasmid to wear off before putting the poor thing out of its misery.

There was only one place left to go now. One way in and one way out to get Fontaine. His intrusion wasn't unnoticed. He thought Fontaine might be harder to get to. That perhaps he would sneak out while Jack fought the waves of Splicers protecting him. That he would have more security then a couple of bodies and bots. That he might even play it smart and hide among the corpses. Having never seen his face, Jack could have just as easily passed him by in his search. But his arrogance and mingled with his idiocy far too often and he just had to open his mouth. Jack would be damned if he didn't know the sound of his voice. Every tonal change, every pitch, every specific pronunciation. He knew it so well, he heard it taunting him even in silence. All it took was one damned word and Fontaine found his spiel cut short as ironically, his own words came back to haunt him, zap 'em and whack 'em.

He woke up tied to a chair, chained rather, as cloth or metal all felt the same to Jack, with the boy himself sitting across from him and staring intently. He had to admit those scientist had done a hell of a job in fashioning him a human weapon. At 6'2" and over 200lbs. of muscles, he had gotten it. It wasn't as if Jack looked smaller on the cameras, but that ugly ass knit sweater he wore was far from intimidating.

"The fuck are you looking at," he spat out.

Jack almost winced. Hearing his voice in person was as unpleasant as it had been over the radio. He had watched Fontaine lull in and out of consciousness, building up his expectations of just what would happen when he came to. He was surprised to discover that he was simply a man, unspliced and still human, genetically speaking. When he opened his mouth, he wasn't disappointed by his crassness. Instead, it made him tired. He hadn't even started yet but he was already tired.

"What's my name," Jack asked.

"What?" Fontaine blinked his eyes slowly and chuckled. "Oh you're fucking kidding me! Are you seriously-"

His words broke off as he laughed riotously. So he wanted to play interrogation.

"I don't know what you're after kid but this ain't your game. Untie me. Now!"

A bit of lightning in his palm and a hard open-handed slap to the face. Jack watched Fontaine's body involuntarily recoiled from the hit. Something was starting to come back to him. He hadn't done this before, but he had had this done to him before. That machine, that headlamp in his room... He remembered it now, and not fondly.

"What is my name," he asked again.

"Fuck you," Fontaine shouted defiantly. "This ain't my first time in a chair junior and let me tell you, you ain't half a shit compared to what I've been through topside. Your wasting your time and mine." He gritted his teeth, "I said untie me!"

A flick of his hand with winter blast and those gritted teeth suddenly started chattering from the immense cold. Jack had briefly considered just hitting him again with armored shell but didn't want to make him incapable of talking just yet. He did acknowledge his words to a degree. Perhaps he wasn't doing enough to get him to talk. He needed something more, a pain that Fontaine wouldn't be able to withstand.

As unfortunate as the memories were that came to him, they held something useful. That television in his room... Those countless hours of videos he was forced to watch without being allowed to eat or sleep. The violence he had to learn to endure and to inflict. "Would you kindly..." Break his fucking neck? He struggled to control his breathing and his rising temper. He looked Fontaine up and down as the latter rapidly breathed in and out, trying to warm himself up as he shivered.

"What's my name," Jack asked again, his voice calm but had grown deeper.

"Fuck you," Fontaine said again.

Jack lifted his hand then slowly lowered it to Fontaine's midsection, right above his navel. Another flick, this time with incinerate, and Fontaine shouted expletives at the top of his lung. He hadn't set him on fire but with his aim, the blast of hot air was wreaking internal havoc. The drastic change in temperatures, from one extreme to the other, only made it feel that much worse.

"You son of a bitch," he shouted. "You fucking son a bitch, Jack!"

Jack waited until he calmed down some and made sure Fontaine had his eyes on his hands. He wanted him to watch as he lazily switched plasmids. He didn't keep one too long in case he thought he get the wrong idea of what to expect.

"What's my name?"

"It's Jack, alright!? Asking like you don't know your own fucking name, you stupid bitch."

An acceptable answer but not an acceptable response. He used a light blow of winter blast, bringing Fontaine some biting discomfort along with relief and a false sense of security. Papa Suchong would be proud.

He used electro bolt next and aimed it directly at his chest. The heart was a stubborn muscle, wasn't it? He used light shocks. He needed to practice controlling his muscle spasms and Fontaine was no more than a live test subject at the moment. When it looked like he was about to talk, Jack ran his fingers up his throat and wrapped his hand around it. He didn't want to hear a damn thing. Fontaine could choke on his saliva in the meanwhile. He didn't break contact until he was ready.

"When was I born," he asked calmly.

"How the fuck would I know? Ask that foreign bitch scientist."

A palm to his chest and an electric shock. Jack could have killed him just as well. He could stand his insolence like no other. But his tolerance for his disrespect of Tenebaum had a shorter limit. He let Fontaine suffer as he considered his answer. It almost sounded like the truth. But Fontaine was too boastful of how much time and money he put into Jack's creation. Argued from a financial standpoint, it would be foolish not to know when such an expensive investment would start to mature. Sure Tenebaum would know. But Tenebaum wasn't whom he had decided to ask.

He removed his hand and waited for Fontaine to catch his breath.

"When was I born?"

"You weren't born, you fucking nutjob," he answered. "You were grown in a fucking lab like a science project! They kept you inside a glass case with tubes and wires. A fake umbilical cord, a fake heartbeat, the works. You wanna say hello to your mother, take a walk back to Suchong's and greet the first fucking Pyrex dish you see, kid."

Jack equipped winter blast once more and grabbed Fontaine's genitals in a vice grip. Oddly enough, the answer didn't anger him. He had only expected as much. It was the delivery that pissed him off. He removed his hand and watch Fontaine double over in pain. He was surprised, disgusted even, to look down and see some liquid running down the man's legs.

"When was I born?"

"I'm going to kill you, kid," he answered. "I was going to spare you and that bitch and let you have this shit hole all to yourselves. You could play family as much as you like while you and the rest of the city fucking drowns. But not anymore. The moment I get loose from here, and I will get loose, I'm going to beat the shit out of you with my own two hands. You, that damn kraut, and those fucking brats!"

A stronger electric shock and Fontaine was gasping for air. Jack was as unaffected as ever. Why wouldn't he just answer the question? For someone who liked to talk so much, this should've been easy. Was he still being too soft? He thought the humiliation of having involuntarily urinating on himself would've humbled him somewhat. But no, instead he was desperate to amend his wounded pride. Jack stood up and readied armored shell. Then he lightly, in his admittedly skewed perception, brought his foot down right in between Fontaine's legs. Less pressure now meant more pain later.

"When was I born?"

Fontaine was sweating. His breathing was haggard. The cold, the heat, the pain, he had one hell of an endurance, Jack had to admit. He brought his foot down a little more.

"I said I don't fucking know," Fontaine yelled. "You weren't born, you get it!? You don't got no birthday! No mother! No nothing! You came out a fucking tube for Christ's sake! Get that through your skull! I brought you from Ryan's trick on the side and they put you in goddamned fish tank! It wasn't even a year until they took you out. "

"What year," he asked taking the pressure off now. That was where the pain came from. Fontaine went red in the face with tears in his eyes.

"1956," he answered. His voice almost sounded like he was pleading now. "In 1956."

Jack took his foot off completely. Fontaine still squirmed in his seat. The pain wouldn't clear up right away. If anything, the lack of pressure made it inevitably worse as there was no longer anything blocking his pain receptors.

"Who named me?"

After a moment, Fontaine started laughing. The same laugh he had when he revealed himself to be Atlas.

"I did," he said. "I gave you your name. I gave you your family. Your parents? They've been workin' for me. Your ma and pa back home on the farm? They're the same eggheads I paid to make you. Watchin' you grow and reportin' it all back to me."

Jack stood up and walked away fast. So even from the beginning, he was... What was he? A belonging? An asset? He knew it, he knew what he had asked for, he knew why he was created and what followed was only reasonable. He had set himself up for it but hearing it didn't make it sting any less.

Despite the physical pain, feeling an ounce of control once again was making Fontaine feel a bit better. Even better to see that stoic freak crack a bit. It brought a smile to his face to think that even while tied to a chair, he still held power over him. The kid may be working over his body but he had worked over his mind. He thought to himself that he had won the game long before Jack ever became a player.

"Come on, Jackie," he chided. "Everyone else has lied to your face. But I'm telling the truth. I answered your questions. So how's it feel? You got what you wanted? You feel better, big guy? There ain't no one in or out of this city that you can trust but me and you know it, don't you?"

Jack may have lacked a lot of things but he didn't consider himself stupid. He wouldn't believe that. It was Fontaine's fault he was suffering. It was Fontaine's fault that he existed... Was he supposed to be thankful? He looked at the radio on his waist. The indicator light had been blinking for a while now. Since it couldn't be Fontaine, and he doubted it was Cohen, like hell he would ever pick up for that man, it must have been Tenebaum. He decided he'd rather busy himself with whatever task she had while his feelings sorted themselves out in the meantime.

Jack turned back around and partially unchained Fontaine from his chair. It would take a bit of struggling for him to undo the rest and by that time, he'd be long gone. Fontaine recognized the trick and wouldn't accept it.

"Hey, kid, don't half-ass it. Undo the rest, would you? Look, I said I'd kill you but you think I won't fight fair? I promise I won't stab you as soon as my arms are free. I said you could trust me, didn't I?"

He didn't even take a parting look as he began to walk towards the elevator.

"Jack," Fontaine yelled after him. "If not for me then how about-"

A chill went down Jack's spine as he began to switch his voice.

"For your old pal, Atlas? What do you say, boyo? Would you kindly-"

It was a bad punch and Jack knew that. Without any plasmids or tonics applied, he had socked him square in the mouth. It was improper form, ineffective, and would do more harm to him than his opponent. He cut his knuckles on his teeth but he didn't care if he had manged to knock even one out. He knew he shouldn't give in. That he could still walk away. That would be the smart thing to do, to not give him the satisfaction of seeing him angry. But against rational thought, hurt and betrayal were stronger.

The blood spilling from Fontaine's mouth was a mixture from his gums and Jack's hand. He got his wish granted. Jack undid the rest of the chains and pulled him from the chair only to knock him down again with another punch, this one better aimed towards his jaw. His legs were numb from sitting so long and he couldn't get up as fast as he'd like. He was on his knees and at this kids mercy. Fontaine was a businessman and a swindler, not a born and bred weapon. He had been a boxer once but the drugs; coke, heroin, and aerosol sprays, everything but ADAM, had driven him from that path long ago. Money came with hired muscle to watch his back. Jack had been his own engineered muscle, was supposed to be, and there was nothing that could go against him.

Jack picked him off his feet by the collar of his jacket and laid into him again. He didn't care where his fists hit as long as they connected. For every 'would you kindly', for every false sign of affection, for every time he had felt sincerely grateful to have someone watching out for him. That Atlas and Fontaine were the same person hadn't registered with him at first. He thought of Atlas as a separate entity, perhaps even a different personality, than Fontaine's. But the hard truth he had to face wasn't that they were one in the same, but that Atlas never existed in the first place. He wasn't even a pawn or tool for Fontaine to use to get close to him, he was just a method. An act. A shill. And Jack had bought it hook, line, heart, and sinker.

He knocked Fontaine around to the point where he could no longer get up. He clung to the floor on all fours as the room spun around him. He tried to crawl away. Jack kicked him as hard as he could in the ribs. He wanted to get up? He would help him up. He picked him up and threw him straight into the console. Was it not far off enough? He stormed over and threw him again, this time over the railing and face down in a puddle of water. Jack applied electric skin and stepped in it, watching him fry a bit before throwing him again onto dry land.

Fontaine was a bloody mess and little more than a corpse barely capable of breathing at this point. Jack had broken a few bones but he didn't feel it was enough. Like hell he would let this bastard die though. He placed his palm over his heart and applied electro shock. He got him to a stable rhythm, then grabbed him by his hair and forced him to look him dead in the eyes.

Jack pulled out a needle, a gift he had decided on, a memento from his childhood to give to him, Fontaine or Atlas or whoever he was. It was a syringe full of green liquid, raw unprocessed ADAM. He jammed it right into his wrist and dropped him onto the floor. He watched him roll around and scream hysterically from the pain. Tenebaum had said ADAM was a vicious drug that ravaged the body like a cancer, attacking healthy cells and replacing them with parasitic stem versions. In his severely weakened state, the pain of the transfusion was greater. His body could provide no resistance and ADAM's instability would hit him twice as hard. But thanks to it, he would live. It would be a cursed existence of addiction and dependency on an increasingly scarce drug that was never meant to be used by humans, but he would live.

A small smile crossed Jack's face at the scene. It was almost a fitting end for Fontaine, to become a desperate junkie in a ruined city. But it wasn't the end for him just yet. He watched until Fontaine stopped moving and then turned to leave.

"I'll be back if I have more questions."


End file.
